Land reclamation project puts St Petersburg at risk
The authorities want new land for residential districts and urban facilities. The 'capital of the north' has similar problems to Venice. Environmentalists protest. Experts: build new neighbourhoods and residential areas modelling them on the city's environmental reality.
St Petersburg (AsiaNews) - The city's development plan includes the "northern reclamation" (severnyj namyv), an extensive mechanised process of laying high-density soil to obtain new land areas for residential neighbourhoods and urban structures, as the 'northern capital' is limited by the waters that surround it and flow through it.
The decision has provoked strong reactions from the citizens of St. Petersburg, who have formed protest committees to ask the Municipal Legislative Assembly to stop the reclamation plan. The local authorities opened the issue for public discussion, which ended on 24 August, without offering the requested clarifications: activists fear that land compaction could lead to severe flooding, which would seriously endanger the historic quarters of the city centre.
In the early 18th century, Peter the Great had St. Petersburg built as a 'city on water' at the cost of enormous effort and the sacrifice of many lives. The Tsar wanted a 'window on Europe' to counter the Baltic and Scandinavian powers, and had committed all the human and material resources of the population to achieve his goal.
The greatest difficulty lay in the embankment to oppose the force of the waters, which flowed from the Neva estuary into the Baltic Sea: now the embankment is in danger of encroaching on Vasilevsky Ostrov, the city's point island on the gulf, from the bridges of which stretches the centre with Liberation Square (and the 1917 revolution) and the imperial Hermitage palace, now home to one of the world's most important art museums.
The issue has become dramatic in these times of climate change and threats to the ecosystem, but the possibilities of saving the historical parts of the 'city of St. Peter', a Russian 'new Rome' with many symbolic dimensions, have long been debated. Some of the projects are reminiscent of the problems that Venice, the model for all the aquatic capitals of northern Europe, has with the long-standing controversy over the Mose bulkheads. In 1975, at the height of the Brezhnev era, the authorities had announced a competition for the reclamation of the Vasilevsky and Dekabristov island districts, won by the legendary architect Nikolaj Baranov, who died in 1989.
Now Baranov's plan is back in the news, as it envisages a landscaping of the area that celebrates the victory of the Great Patriotic War (World War II), and the sacrifice of the long siege of Leningrad, with the opening of a new theme park and a large granite memorial, to be connected to the area's Armenian cemetery. The project passes through a reclamation to create a compact land between the islands, in which to open the Victory Park.
Baranov's grandiose plan was only partly realised, blocked after the end of the USSR, although officially it was never cancelled. Today it is being revived in a distorted manner, assigning a dimension to the reclamation that many consider unsustainable. The activists' accusation is that an attempt is also being made to use the war rhetoric, so much in vogue, to obtain prospects of great speculation, with the risk of an ecological catastrophe.
Specialists also confirm the fears of the protesters, such as Semen Gordyševskij, president of the Citizen's Committee for Ecological Safety, according to whom 'the damage would be inevitable, the new buildings would change the climatic processes of the entire city, and birds, fish, micro-organisms, vegetation would disappear... Today you cannot make urban or architectural plans without taking into account the consequences on the environment'.
According to the experts, new neighbourhoods and housing areas can be built, but they must be 'modelled' on the surrounding environmental reality, and today this model does not appear to be available. This is the future of a large city, but also that of the entire planet.
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17/09/2022 12:54
